Content Bridges Services

Press Mentions

Ad Age: Why So Many Media Companies Stumble GloballyThe few news brands that have succeeded, to greater or lesser degrees, arguably include CNN, Bloomberg, People, Thomson Reuters, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Financial Times and The Economist. Other contenders are the Associated Press, the BBC, ABC, NBC, maybe CBS, National Public Radio, News Corp. and the top U.K. dailies, said Ken Doctor, the newspaper veteran who's now an analyst at Outsell. "If a news-media organization sees itself as covering the wider world, sees it as its foundation, that in and of itself differentiates it from all the local media -- newspapers, TV, radio -- out there," he said. "If, in addition, it has substantial reporting and editing resources, then it can play. The tough part is the part we're in: Who wins the race to ubiquity and can make it pay off?"

NYT: If The Globe Were Sold, What Price? “The best guesstimate of the real price: a buck. The best of an announced price: between $50 and $100 million,” he wrote in an e-mail message. The devil will be in the details of the obligations that a buyer would assume, he said, adding that “a buck essentially represents a gentleman’s agreement: I take a liability, headache and a distraction off your hands.”
He said that the Times Company could hang on to some pension liabilities or other obligations in exchange for a higher purchase price, a number that would give the appearance that it was getting something for the more than $1 billion it paid 16 years ago. He added that no bank would be interested in financing a deal given how other deals have blown up, so “the owner’s own money is immediately at risk.”

BizTimes.com: Journal Sentinel faces daunting choices“There’s no strategy – this is panic. What we’re likely to see this year (around the country) and what we’ll see in Milwaukee too is (publishers asking) how much they need to cut back and how much they can do to still hold their place in the market. For publishers, it’s about ‘How do we stay alive and stay profitable until we can get to some sort of breathing period?’ (Economic) recovery will not bring back their old business, but it will give them some breathing room.”

AP: Threat to shut Boston Globe shows no paper is safThe threat to close the paper "sends a very clear message to all employees and unions of surviving newspapers — that this is not business as usual. This is uncharted territory....Newspapers all "have a sword over their heads," said Doctor. If the industry wants to survive, he said, "everyone has to give some blood."

Site Meter

BlogBurst

News Archives Business

June 08, 2009

Things are turning ugly. Globe staffers up the ante in Boston. John Carroll calls Sam Zell an idiot. Online ads on newspaper sites drop to double-digit negatives. Which leaves me, as we approach this summer of our discontent, with more questions than answers. Here's Nine:

1. Down the road, will the Globe Guild members like their new owners better than the New York Times Company? Certainly, the Globe's sense of loss is understandable -- and real. Still, it's intriguing to compare the Globe Guild's rejection of the Times' offer to the Portland Guild's recent partnering with venture capitalists to take Maine Newspapers down a new road. The Maine Guild accepted givebacks to get the deal done, and to get a share of the company. My sense: It's always easier to be enthusiastic about the new, unknown guys than the management you've dealt with for years, even it is the New York Times.

2. Where will lenders -- the new owners-to-be of bankrupt newspapers like the Tribune and the Inquirer -- turn for new leadership? They've got old-time publishers to choose from -- lots of them in the market -- as they replace the entrepreneurs like Sam Zell and Brian Tierney who fatally entered the trade in the last several years. They've got broadcast people, borrowing a page from Zell's playbook, as inevitably newspaper and local broadcast operations do grow together. They've got their pick of ad veterans, if they smartly see that local media success is going to be dependent on inventing scalable digital businesses.

3a. Won't Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal's okay of Tribune's merged TV/newspaper operations in Hartford seem quaint fairly soon? Sure, the FCC-related value of diverse community voices is a good idea. Going forward, though, the divide between local news video and local story/blog writing creation is an artificial one. Bottom line: The marketplace will probably take care of local news diversity rather than the increasingly outmoded rules of Old Media.

3b. Aren't we finally able to put a pricetag on Sam Zell's unwarranted optimism and hubris? It looks like his $250 million "loan" to Tribune will be wiped out in the bankruptcy, as will his $90 million warrant. Still, it's just pin money for the guy who sold his real estate investment trust for $36 billion in 2006 and knows enough -- endowing the Zell Center for Risk Research at Northwestern -- to make judicious bets.

4. While the San Diego News Network (Chris Jennewein's new hangout) is hardly a commercial threat yet in San Diego, the cratering of the Union-Tribune -- a one-time employer of 1422 people that will soon be paying only 572 850 -- leads to this question, in San Diego and elsewhere: How big a marketplace hole does a disappearing daily leave in its wake? My guess is that with an economic recovery, we'll see lots of small-shop entrepreneurs aiming to pick up local merchant dollars now in flux.

5. Why would anyone expect the Kindle to "save" newspapers when it hardly supports advertising and takes 70% of subscription revenue?

May 17, 2009

Oops. As Amazon makes its move from retailer to publisher, it has stumbled clumsily, but not surprisingly. Amazon is fundamentally a bookseller, a bookseller that knocked out the walls in the adjoining online mall to sell everything from KLH sound equipment to Kingston digital gadgets K'NEX toys to now its very product, The Kindle.

The Kindle has convinced Jeff Bezos that he is no longer just a major merchant, but now a publisher. First, books, then newspapers and magazines and, as of last week, "Kindle Publishing for Blogs." No sooner had the program launched last week that people figured out at Twitter speed that anyone could register any blog, and get in the pipeline to get 30% of the subscription price any Kindle customer decided to pay for that block of content.

Tech Crunch's Erick Schonfeld broke the news of the flimsiness of the Amazon's vetting process on Thursday. He showed how easy it was for anyone to claim and register anyone's else content, doing so with NYTimes.com's Bits Blog. Good post. It hit directly on the easy invitation to copyright theft that the Kindle's blog non-process openly invited, though it didn't note that both profit-seekers and Amazon-folly-pointers were merrily posting porn blogs, always a good digital moneymaker.

Now, Amazon has responded and says it has taken down the offending blogs. On Sunday, though, Kindle readers tell me that porn sites are still available through the new blog service. It's not clear what vetting process it will use going forward.

Overall, we can see a couple of things in Amazon's cluelessness about how to incorporate blogs into news products. First, just because massive retailers can be publishers, that doesn't confer on them any of them judgments that real publishers -- Old Media and New -- have running in their bloodstreams. Everybody of course makes mistakes, but the truism in this case is true: everyone makes the same mistakes in editing, so make small ones as you learn the trade. Amazon just hasn't had time. Its pretense that it is a publisher, when it is really a super-aggregator of books-plus, shows through in cases like this blog program.

We saw another indication of Amazon's inflated sense of itself in the last week's Senate hearings on the state of the newspaper industry. Jim Moroney, publisher of the Dallas Morning News, was one of those who testified. Moroney talked about his negotiations with Amazon. Yes, he'd taken umbrage at Amazon's non-negotiable demand for 70% of revenue from subscriptions sold -- even Steve Jobs always takes only 30% at Apple for iTunes apps -- but he would have even swallowed hard and accepted that. What Moroney found unacceptable -- and well, he should -- is that Amazon wanted rights to distribute Belo content to "any wireless device", without further permission of the publisher.

If this is the case -- and I haven't been able to yet verify it -- then it shows a new publisher's overreaching. Sure Jeff Bezos wants to get repaid for all that promotional space on Amazon's home page -- building buzz, offering Millennial solutions to newspaper woes -- but trying to usurp wireless distribution rights is simply over the top. We will soon live in a wireless news and information bubble; asking vendors to turn over their futures really takes hubris. Hubris, always, takes its lumps, eventually.

We can see these learning publisher steps in craigslist's behevior around "erotic services" ads. Yes, we are all quite clear that federal law -- well-intended to enable the Web to become a free-flowing source of information in our democracy -- allows common carriers such as craigslist to flow through ads without checking each one. The right is fairly clear, and it's worked well to the original intention.

The right to publish, though, shouldn't be confused with the necessity to publish. That's a responsibility that all traditional publishers understand deeply over time. craigslist, a relatively new publisher, is still learning it. Yes, maybe, it's had the the right to act as a digital pimp for long time, but it didn't mean that it had to. An apparent ad-related murder, and the hot breath of prosecutors, brought home that point. craigslist didn't have to wait for that pressure. Amazon shouldn't have to wait for people to point out that it is allowing porn sites, or non-owned content to be added to the Kindle, to do the right thing.

Certainly, publishers make mistakes, but rookie publishers make bigger ones.

That's one big lesson about our Pro-Am world in which everyone can indeed be a publisher.

I also wonder about the the Kindle Blog initiative -- it was labeled "Kindle Publishing for Blogs Beta" prominently in its acknowledgment of its blunder, though not "Beta" on its promotional page -- in terms of its blog selection process.

While it makes selective decisions about the books, newspapers and magazines that it accepts for the Kindle, it is opening up the blog program for all. That idea reinforces the democratic nature of the blogosphere, but gives up on the "qualified by Amazon" notion. It could have licensed directly or through blog aggregators the top end of the blogosphere, paralleling its books/newspapers/magazines approach. That, too, has often been the role of a publisher -- deciding what content to include and not to include. Maybe, that just seemed too daunting with blogs, or maybe Amazon just has another strategy in mind, including the usage of its prodigious recommendation engine to the world of current content.

We'll have to wait to find out more about that strategy, as Amazon becomes more comfortable in that publisher role, and the implicit obligation that has long accompanied it: Participating in the media discussion itself.

September 15, 2008

Something about the cratering US financial system going on out there on the isle of Manhattan, sources tell me. Meanwhile, here on the Left Coast, it's round 74 of Google and Yahoo. GooglyHoo is giving lots of people a case of the hives, an itching reaction in search of a rash.

The latest scratcher is the World Association of Newspapers. Today, it denounced the proposed Google/Yahoo search "cooperation" deal as anti-competitive. For good measure, its statement released lots of frustration about newspaper companies' diminished standing in this new world order in creation. In part, WAN points out that of the $48 billion in online advertising revenue that Google has collected since 2001, less than one-third of that has been shared with online publishers. Those big numbers are of course the ones that hurt, more than the cost-per-click impacts of GooglyHoo.

So nine quick questions on the boiling Google/Yahoo cauldron:

1. Who gave the pile-on signal? Now, according to Bloomberg,
the EU is joining the fray, asking for a few Yahoo and Google documents
(no, not Google Docs). That makes the Department of Justice, eleven
states and the EU. No word yet from Bruce Sherman.

2. Why is the inquiry only about Google's search dominance? Yes, it controls 70%+ of the paid search market, but it's goals are clearly global ad dominance. It has made forays into print newspaper, print magazine and broadcast advertising. It bought YouTube, becoming a major video ad player. It bought DoubleClick, planning a major move into the display market. So on the sell side, it will be able to offer integrated packages of advertising -- a little search, a little display, a little pre-roll -- to ad buyers. While today, much of advertising buying is segmented by type, I've got no doubt that there's a Starship Enterprise console out there in the ad buyer's future, with audience targetable, using various types of advertising through a single interface. Without legal roadblocks, today, you'd have to bet that the console would be branded "Google." Shouldn't DOJ ask P & G, GM and Walmart (all companies that have criticized the Google/Yahoo proposed combo) about Google's wider ad role?

3. Didn't Joe Nocera nail it in his Saturday New York Times column, describing the experience of one company, Sourcetools, as it first won big and then lost big in the Google ad world? The AdSense/AdWords stuff makes so many heads hurt; telling the story (journalism!) through one company's experience is a great analgesic.

4. Does it help or hurt newspaper companies? That kind of depends on whether they are bigger buyers of AdWords or bigger displayers of AdSense. There's little doubt that the further monopolization of paid search will lead to higher pricing -- there's not sufficient alternative inventory to buy of significant scale. So if you are buying AdWords, they should cost more. But if you're a big AdSense partner, like the New York Times, your share of the take should increase as well. We don't know the particulars of each affiliate deal, but would hope that newspaper companies could get a fair packaged deal from Google. And yes, having Yahoo out there as somewhat of a paid search competitor, has made the chances of getting a better deal better.

5. Will it make a big difference to Newspaper Consortium members? Apparently not much. The Consortium members, almost half of US papers by circulation, take Yahoo search as part of their wider participation. For their participation, they get a contracted minimum payment, and sources say that earned ad payments haven't reached the minimums yet, generally. So, if GooglyHoo does increase pricing of ads, earned revenue should increase, but wouldn't result in actual new dollars falling into newspaper company pockets, at least for awhile.

September 11, 2008

As I train down to D.C. for the Online News Association conference (moderating a panel hopefully titled, Optimize and Monetize, tomorrow; if you're there, say hello), the dizzying news industry news of the last week raises more questions than answers. Here's my top nine of the moment. Feel free to add to them:

As we keep one eye out for the WSJ.com re-launch Sept. 16, I'm wondering why there's no WSJ -- or Marketwatch or Barrons -- app in the iPhone App Store. It's the place to be and be seen, show the flag and at least seem au courant. So far AP is there, with deep local, NYT has a strong, if straightforward presence, Internet Broadcasting has put together a decent aggregation product and Express is porting over its useful Palm/Blackberry product. But news company participation beyond that is weak, and not well-niched. Will a mobile iPhone app be part of the 9/16 re-do?

How much more prominent will video be on the WSJ site? It's halfway down now on the home page now, though still a bit higher than NYT's video display. Both text-based companies are starting to master video, but their sites seem to say: text and photos. And, though, we know the Washington Post is doing massive video training, led by Chet Rhodes, here, too, we see little front-and-center placement. News customers are getting beyond a world of "content types" -- text, story, photo, audio, video, bar chart, etc. -- and just expect to get all the relevant info delivered on a single page, with best coverage (regardless of type) highlighted.

New York's tabloids had a field day with the lipstick-on-a-pig nonsense (Post: "Boar War"; Daily News: "Lipstick Bungle". Will the Post be right with its data box head, "Slim pickins"? Indeed, did one of globe's top three rich guys buy at a suitably low-price, considering? Considering among other things that the New York Times is still the top newspaper brand in the world, and that it has barely tapped markets around the world. there are about 900 million English speakers here and there, and yet the Times today derives only about 4% of its revenues from outside the US (mainly International Herald Tribune-related.) That's a big potential upside. Slim's confidence in the Times also underscores the difference in value in national/global brands (like the Times and Dow Jones, as compared to local and regional papers. The big question here is how much the buy is a strategic, long-term one, with hands largely off, and how much a Harbinger-like one, pushing for greater short-term change and divestment of non-Times brand properties?

As newspaper market caps plummet, how great a percentage of those valuations are now built on real estate? Sam Zell's people probably know more about the land under his holdings in L.A., Chicago, Baltimore and Florida, than they do about what's going on top of the land. NYT has taken criticism for its airy new HQ, which has been valued for as much as $1B. For the industry as a whole, with goodwill being discounted daily and future revenues highly uncertain, these real estate holdings are getting to be a prominent piece of newspaper valuations.

If Gary Pruitt's not setting the table today, then how soon will tomorrow come? The McClatchy CEO issued a statement to tamp down journalists' and analysts' saying his stepping apart from four family trusts may signify financial restructuring and/or going private. Maybe that's so -- and the move is long-planned and coincidental to the company's current stress. Pruitt had to know that the trustee change would be found by journalists, and that would start speculation. So why not get out ahead of it, with a statement? Yes, the means of restructuring are tough, but something is going to give somewhere at McClatchy, and it's hard not to see this move as one part of setting the table for it.

Isn't Dow Jones' touting of the "Heard on the Street" expansion just another volley in the budding all-out war between WSJ and NYT over business news? WSJ made some news, gleefully talking staff expansion and iconic Heard on the Street expansion as the Times has had to mainly talk about cutbacks. Heard's expansion, and the folding in of the WSJ's "The Skeptic" blog, makes sense. It's a strategic journalism, taking a well-known column, turning it into a brand, turning loose staffers to follow the business sun around the globe and expanding its presence in print and digitally. Online, Heard still seems more newspaper-like than blog-like (how will it be handled in the redesign?). We don't get the sense of constant updating by its newly assigned staff of 12. NYT's Andrew Ross Sorkin's Dealbook is the growing competing brand -- and it may get a boost as the Times moves forward with a business and tech news upgrade of its own the end of this month.

As the long-awaited, much-planned-for and much-trained-for Yahoo ad platform rolls out later this month with the San Francisco Chronicle and the Mercury News, how much will the platform separate the growers from the shrinkers? Many consortium companies -- more than 40% of US circulation -- have invested in sales training and re-training. Some have hired anew, all for the purpose of making the most out of the behavior-tracking Yahoo platform. They believe its power will up their local rates and gain them substantial revenue streams from selling Yahoo inventory. The rub, though, is, as is often the case, execution. Case in point: in phase one of the Yahoo/newspaper ad deals, in which buys have been enabled more manually, a few newspaper titles have gone to town, well into deep six figures, while others have practically no new revenue to show. As consortium members look at consortium benchmarks over time -- the rollout of news sites on the platform won't be completed until the end of 2009, they'll see how well, or poorly, they're performing compared to peers. As we see quarterly earnings from 2Q, 2009 on, we'll all see who's making most of the Yahoo Bump.

How soon before Yahoo-owned video service Maven is integrated into the consortium ad play, at least as an option? Just as readers are getting more content-type agnostic, ad buyers increasingly want more centralized ways to buy audience, whether behavioral-targeted display or pre-roll?

How COOL is that? Could that be the budget regimen for 2009. COOL, as in expense reduction through: Clustering (having close-by properties share services), Outsourcing (you name it!), Offshoring (ad production plus) and plain old Letting Go, as in people, buildings, distribution trucks, etc. More on COOL soon.

June 08, 2008

Sam, I get it. You're being aggressive. When you add to Randy Michaels' aggressive talk about cutting newspaper size and staff that "I promise you he is underestimating the level of aggressiveness with which we are attacking this whole challenge," you seem to be proudly announcing that the newest barbarians may well be inside the gates. I'm not sure who that impresses aims to impress -- your employees are fairly shell-shocked already -- but it does capture attention.

What I don't get is why the aggressiveness seems to take us back to 1980 rather than forward to 2012? (Though 2012 may seem even further away to Zell and Michaels than it does to Hillary Clinton.)

It's little surprise to keen observers of the new Tribune that more draconian cuts had to be on the way. Zell relied on this trading acumen, and luck, to create an auction for Newsday, and that netted him tens of millions more than most people will tell you the paper is worth. The Cubs, Wrigley Field and cable network assets are next, but the deepening downturn in the industry (and as of Friday, maybe the cyclical economy as well) tell us that those asset sales may not even be enough to get Tribune through 2009.

What is surprising is that in publicly announcing cutbacks, Randy Michaels, Zell's radio guy-turned-Tribune czar, is focusing on, of all things, PRINT.

Take his notion of how to make the papers more readable and sell more of them.

Michaels saying the papers will become more USA Today-like, with:

"a new look and feel in each market, emphasizing what people are telling us they want in the research: charts, graphs, maps, lists."

Wow. Great solution for 1992 perhaps, 10 years after USA Today turned the newspaper world, Pleasantville-like, from black and white to color. The problem with that is that USA Today is essentially flat last several years in circulation, and it's got a national base and multiplicity of hotel/travel programs to keep the numbers up. The biggest innovation of the last couple of years isn't the color weather map on USA Today's back page; it's Google's ability to map everything and anything, instantly -- at the customer's fingertips and choice, 24/7.

Which takes us to the bigger news that Tribune figured out that the problem is one of ratios, now believing that a 50/50 ratio of ads to news is right.

Michaels' reasoning:

"If we take, for instance, the Los Angeles Times to a 50-50 ratio â¦ the smallest paper, Monday and Tuesday, [would be] 56 pages. That would be substantially larger than that day's Wall Street Journal. We don't think that's a bad value to the consumer. And we think that by doing that, and then by being able to produce less editorial content â¦ we can save a lot of money by producing the right-size newspaper.

Let me hear that again. You're going to decide how much editorial content to produce by seeing how much will fit into the new downsized papers? You're going to ratchet down the amount of editorial content (and staff), leaving the decision of what you are going to give your print readers essentially in the hands of print ad buyers?

Surely, we can make good journalistic arguments about the folly of that. Journalism's never been mainly a quantitative business. But let's look broadly at "product." Would Randy Michaels, who rebuilt Clear Channel on a low-cost model, let the amount of radio ads sold determine how much programming listeners got? I don't think so; you've still got to have a consistent product for listeners or readers.

Readers are already fleeing newspapers -- and I'm talking about decades-long readers, not the young whom the industry too often blames -- because they see every day that less is less. This change, however it looks on a spreadsheet, will only hasten that decline.

That's a decline that is, at this point, inevitable anyhow. I give Michaels' credit in publicly announcing some thinking about how to justify cuts, but he could have put it more simply. People and paper are our two biggest costs, and we don't have enough money to maintain current levels of spending. That's less fancy, but more to the point.

What we'll soon see is "daily" papers becoming, uh, less daily. Monday and Tuesday editions are a sinkhole, with the latest evidence here, as MediaNews looks to those days as "quick-read" editions. Those days could soon be dropped completely, at smaller operations here and there. Anyhow, the whole notion of a daily newspaper is now obsolescent. It has taken way too long to get to 24/7 newsrooms and news output, but that's what the national players -- from CNN to the New York Times to the BBC -- have adjusted to. Even TBO.com, in Tampa Bay, has made a centerpiece of its new "Continuous News Desk" and committed a couple of dozen people (print, broadcast, web) to making it work.

The old daily paper is being -- as we watched Hillary Clinton's concession on Saturday and its instant analysis on TV and web -- replaced by the web.

October 11, 2007

It used to be simple: today's paper and birdcage material. We published the paper, and never looked back, almost literally. The trusty librarians could dig through yellowed files, should we need to find something written some time back. But we relied more on our memories, or those growing stacks of papers in our offices and cubicles.

Pre-Internet, the readers did the same. Some newsprint lovers nursed stashes of old papers, some containing precious articles, some big stories worth keeping, some untapped treasures to be gotten to some day.

In the first 10 years of the Internet, that's begun to change, but slowly. News publishers early on recreated the doorstep/birdcage divide. Soon as they figured out they couldn't charge for today's content, they felt compelled to charge for something. Hence, archives. Walled-off and searchable, but through separate interfaces, at per-article and bundled costs. These products have created good revenue streams, but not major ones. That's what has led both Time Inc. and the New York Times to unbuckle their archive belts and open them up to the public.

As Dan Gillmor sagely pointed out as the Times announced the freeing of the archives (and the termination of Times Select), the Times seized the opportunity to become the publisher of record, instant world news, everywhere, a real platform for 21st century growth. Local news publishers are now scratching their own heads, wondering if they can become the publishers of record for their metro areas and communities, and whether they'll be similarly (though on a smaller scale) rewarded. There are many edges to that argument, and I won't go into them here.

But I do want to point to what I think is a set of breakthroughs in how we think about and access those yellowed pages (what colors do pixels turn?). It's a simple timeline, and I think we'll see it become mainstream, and as much a part of news consciousness as the empty search rectangle has become.

August 12, 2007

This week, the Times proudly announced a new blog. This one's by the Freakonomics partners Stephen Dubner and Steven Levitt. Basically, they've brought their Freakonomics blog to the Times. In an interview, Dubner said he was happy with the Times' home, and agreed to it with an important term: that it not be put into Times Select, firewalled away from public access.

"As much as I love The Times, I didn’t want to be part of TimesSelect,” said Mr. Dubner. “That would have been the only deal-breaker," he told the New York Observer.

So you can see the handwriting growing larger here. The Times is smartly moving beyond its stable of high-end staff columnists, picking and choosing intriguing voices on the web and stamping them with the Times brand. This may be the first "outside" blog licensed by the Times, but expect others to soon follow. In fact, the Times has appointed an editor, Melissa Lafsky, previously of The Huffington Post, for the blog, and we would presume work beyond solely Freakonomics.

That's an essential long-term strategy for all significant news players on the web. Most writers, and I believe, many reporters, will become free agents, contracting with major distributors like the Times, search aggregators like Yahoo, MSN and Google, and niche sites of many kinds.

As they do that -- and as the Times competes for their services -- Dubner's insistence on being on the open web would be heard often. The fact that Freakonomics is out on the open web, and Frank Rich and Maureen Dowd are not has got to further fry them. So let the countdown continue.

July 24, 2007

ADDENDUM: Yes, the Times' numbers were predictably low when published Wednesday, ad revenue down 5.7%, revenue down 3.7% and operating profits off 2.7%, apple-to-apples with last year. (The operating profits number is a correction to what I had reported earlier.) I'm buoyed a bit though by CEO Janet Robinson's apparently getting it about mobile: She talks about building “an innovation capability to anticipate consumer preferences and creates ways to satisfy them. Mobility is at the heart of the group’s activities.”
(Good quick-run down on the numbers and announcement on paidcontent.org, by David Kaplan, here)

The New York Times numbers will be out in the morning. They won't be great, judging from the revenue carnage we've seen in the industry. Interestingly, we'll probably see some new numbers on Times Select, the Times' experiment in online subs. When Martin Nisenholtz launched it about two years ago, he told me that his goal was $10 million in new revenue. He hoped, he said, to be able to pull half of that into building up the Times website, hiring innovative people to do new things to grasp the promise of the Internet. Well, it looks like recent numbers tell us that the Times is close to those numbers. Only 31 per cent of Times Select members have been fully paying customers -- at about $49 a year -- with the rest being print subscribers who get access to Times Select as a perk.

But multiply out the paying subs and you get to about $10-11 million. I don't know how much of that Martin has been able to invest in the site, and how much has helped the Times cope with print ad downturns. Certainly, we look to the Washington Post for greater innovation -- Local Explorer, blogs, local user-gen experimentation, useful and welcoming City Guide -- more than we do the Times.

And now PaidContent.org's Staci Kramer reports on a NY Post story that the Times is re-assessing Times Select, given the Times' recent official non-thumb's up thumbs-up: “While TimesSelect is very popular and we have certainly met and exceeded our goals since it began in 2005, we continue to evaluate the best approach to our business.”
Times Select has been controversial from its birth on, putting up a wall in front of 20+"selected" columnists. The program has effectively kept Tom Friedman, Maureen Dowd, Frank Rich and Paul Krugman from the great ocean of Internet discourse, a loss to the Times' centrality in the political discussions gripping the nation. It's also meant a foregoing of ad revenue. How much?

Well, let's figure that the Times could add 40 million page views per month, if it freed its columnists (and some other walled content) including some multimedia from the shackles of Times Select). Let's say it monetized those views at a paltry $25. That would mean about a million dollars a month, or annually $12-13 million, more than Times Select.

So maybe the money could be made up.

But the rub is that the Times Select play is about more than revenue. It's about holding onto as many of those high-paying print subscribers as long as possible. That print subscriber money is essential to the Times' bottom line, even as print revenue is increasingly challenged. Currently, 28% of the Times' revenue comes from circulation, higher than 20% or so average of the newspaper industry.

Whether the Times keeps Select or tries other ideas, it's got to be clearer with its customers about what it is offering us. Last week I took the four-page "All Access" insert out of the Times, hoping to be impressed.

I liked the idea of All Access. It had all the earmarks of the modern age -- a "Have It Your Way" approach to news publishing in the 21st Century. The message seems right, but I think the delivery is still flawed. Or let me put a better, more charitable face on it: It's a work-in-progress.

One friend described my assessment of All Access elsewhere as being "a tough grader." Tough love, and especially this week when the Times has suddenly become our all-important national paper, with the Wall Street Journal on the road to compromises that threaten its value to the democracy.

All Access is an important idea, and it gets introduced at the same time the Times is significantly pricing up its single-copy and subscriber pricing. Sunday moves from $5 single copy to $6 and daily moves from $1 to $1.25, with at least some subscriber pricing up as well.

Those are good hefty percentage increases. They are part of a strategy to provide more and more to subscribers -- Times Select columns were the first lure.

July 22, 2007

Google Checkout has been one of those stealthy projects, seemingly in permanent beta. But we've always known it could be a potential force -- and competitor to Paypal -- as it gets connected with more of the matching and mating that Google Search does.

Lately, I've been noticed the Google Checkout logo popping up in the right-hand column paid search results. It says to the consumer: here's not only an ad, but you can easily buy here, through your new friend Google Checkout. Potentially, a huge competitive advantage to advertisers (who may be fourth or eighth in the rankings -- Google is really selling prominence here) and of course to Google, which will take a share of each and every transaction.

Now, on Google, the content world is separate. Search on Archives, left hand nav of any News page. You'll still the first-gen look there. Some archival stories are free. Others run anywhere from $2.95 to $7.95, as publishers and their representatives try to recoup a little of their investment in producing those stories. You can see prices from the New York Times, Lexis Nexis, Proquest, NewsBank, Access My Library and many others. But the action now is this: click through to the publisher or aggregator and use its e-commerce system. Not only does the consumer pay; he or she has to master a new interface, add a credit card, etc., etc., etc. Wouldn't it be easier if Google just offered a Google Checkout option?

Of course, and you know it will. We just don't when. And many content sellers will of course say yes. After hemming and hawing, the volume of traffic and the prominence offered will be irresistible. That's why Google is becoming Syndication Squared. Matchining all content to all advertising and taking a Ma Bell-like cut of it all.

February 15, 2007

Paid print circulation still pays the bills. I keep coming back to the numbers recently laid out by Time Inc. CEO Ann Moore: Each Sports Illustrated paid reader is worth $118 a year,
mainly in advertising, while each SI.com visitor fetches a measly $5. That differential explains why prestigious, long-standing, paid circ vehicles like Time Magazine
are just about giving away their product......while calling it paid. Anything to keep those print readers and that print rate base as high as possible, 'til that $5 zooms
into double digits and beyond.

The offer I got today:

56 weeks of Time at the "Welcome Back" rate of $19. (Yes, given my overflowing NetVibes RSS reader, it's hard to find time to read Time.) 19 bucks against a cover price of $252.45 for the same 56 issues! That's a 92.5% discount.

But that's not all:

FREE GIFT: The ULTRASONIC Laser Level

BONUS: 6 Additional Months of TIME (when you pay now)

TIME Archive at www.Timearchive.com, featuring 80 years of coverage, for free.

I suppose I can use the level to measure the tectonic changes shaking the publishing industry.

I should note the offer is labeled: "For Senior Citizen Use Only." Like an AARP pitch. I'm flattered but the MSN Life Expectancy calculator gives me another 42 years of life expectancy.

It's an offer that's hard to resist, and I won't. That archive can come in mighty handy for research.